Advancing Mentor Teachers' Practices Through Collaborative Pedagogical Reasoning (Collaborative Research: Ghousseini)

There is growing momentum to support teachers to engage in responsive mathematics teaching, which is critical to realizing more equitable instruction. In this approach, teachers recognize and attend to the diversity and substance of all students’ ideas and leverage those ideas in instruction. Yet, learning to engage in responsive mathematics teaching is challenging, as this work requires interpreting classroom activity in-the-moment and making decisions that are well reasoned and intentional. This decision-making process, known as pedagogical reasoning, is often invisible to observers, making it hard for novices to learn. Teacher education programs typically provide novice teachers with opportunities to work in classrooms alongside seasoned professionals (mentor teachers); however, the activity of pedagogical reasoning is rarely a focus of such mentoring. Given the importance of mentor teachers for novice teachers’ development of instructional practices and the amount of time novices spend in mentored classroom placements, the project researchers view the mentor-novice teacher relationship as a critical site for intervention. This project leverages the role of mentor teachers to support novices’ development of pedagogical reasoning and increase the likelihood that they will be prepared to engage in responsive mathematics teaching. Mentor teachers in three differently structured teacher education programs will receive professional development aimed at making their pedagogical reasoning visible and supporting them in engaging collaboratively with novices in this type of teacher thinking. The researchers refer to this type of mentoring as collaborative pedagogical reasoning (Co-PR). They will study mentor teachers’ development of Co-PR and its relationship to responsive teaching. They will also consider how different program structures and characteristics influence the development of Co-PR. Findings will produce usable practices for developing teachers’ mentoring strategies across different teacher education programs, which will subsequently support mentor and novice teachers’ learning of responsive mathematics teaching.

This project aims to enhance the quality of elementary mathematics teaching by supporting mentor teachers to better prepare the next generation of novice teachers to engage in responsive mathematics teaching. This design-based intervention study is based on several hypotheses about how mentor teachers might play a stronger role in supporting novices to develop these practices in K-8 classrooms. Specifically, the researchers hypothesize that if mentor teachers make their pedagogical reasoning visible to novices through engagement in collaborative pedagogical reasoning (Co-PR), then novice teachers will learn about the invisible decision-making that skilled teachers engage in as they carry out responsive mathematics teaching. Further, they hypothesize that mentor teachers can be supported to engage in Co-PR through the design of learning opportunities that afford joint inquiry with others and are mediated with shared tools, designed to guide both disciplinary and equitable aspects of responsive teaching. Using an inquiry group professional development structure at three strategic sites, the researchers aim to build mentoring tools and structured opportunities that support mentor teachers to make visible the layers of their decision making and to facilitate Co-PR with novices before, during, and after teaching. The project team will study the development of mentor and novice teachers’ Co-PR, exploring growth in their pedagogical reasoning and factors that contribute to this development. They will also investigate how the enactment of Co-PR differs across teacher education types and programs. Findings will contribute to scholarly insights about mentor and novice teacher development and will generate a set of mentoring tools useful to the fields of mathematics education and teacher education.